Epidemic of Mauritius Island.

— A few months ago one of our mediums, Mr. T…, who frequently falls into spontaneous somnambulism under the magnetization of the Spirits, told us that at that moment Mauritius Island was being devastated by a terrible epidemic that was decimating the population. This prediction came to pass, even with aggravating circumstances. We have just received from one of our correspondents on Mauritius Island a letter, dated May 8, from which we extract the following passages.

“Several Spirits had announced to us, some clearly, others in prophetic terms, a destructive scourge about to strike us. We took these revelations from the moral point of view, and not from the physical point of view. Suddenly a strange malady breaks out on this poor island; a nameless fever, which takes on all forms, begins gently, hypocritically, then increases and strikes down all whom it can reach. It is now a true plague; the physicians do not understand it; up to now, none of those who were stricken have been cured. They are terrible attacks that prostrate you and torture you for at least twelve hours, attacking, each in its turn, every important organ; then the malady ceases for one or two days, leaving the patient overwhelmed until the next attack, and thus one proceeds, more or less rapidly, toward the fatal end. “As for me, I see in all this one of those announced scourges, which must remove from the world a part of the present generation, and are destined to bring about a renewal that has become necessary. I will give you an example of the infamies that take place here.

“Quinine in a very strong dose halts the attacks for only a few days; it is the only specific capable of interrupting, at least momentarily, the progress of the cruel malady that is decimating us.

“The merchants and the pharmacists had it in a certain quantity, and it cost them about 7 fr. an ounce. Now, as this remedy was of necessity bought by everyone, those gentlemen took advantage of the occasion to raise the price of an individual’s potion from 1 fr., the ordinary price, up to 15 fr. Then quinine became scarce; that is, those who had it, or who received it by mail, sold it at the fabulous price of 2 fr. 50 c. the grain, retail, and at 675 and 800 fr. an ounce, wholesale. Into one potion go at least 30 grains, totaling 75 fr. per potion. Thus, only the rich could buy, and those merchants looked with indifference upon thousands of unfortunates dying around them, for lack of the money necessary to acquire the medicine. “What do you say to this? Ah! it is history! Even at this moment quinine arrives in quantity; the pharmacies have it in abundance, but they will not sell the dose for less than 12 fr. 50 c. Therefore the poor always die, gazing in desolation at that treasure which they cannot reach!

“I myself was stricken by the epidemic and am in my fourth relapse. I am ruining myself with quinine. It prolongs my existence, but, as I fear, if the relapses continue, my dear sir, upon my word of honor! it is very probable that in a short while I shall have the pleasure of attending, as a Spirit, your Parisian sessions and of taking part in them, if God permits. Once in the world of the Spirits, I shall be closer to you and to the Society than I am on Mauritius Island. In a single thought I transport myself to your sessions, without fatigue and without fearing bad weather. Besides, I have not the least fear, I swear it to you; I am too sincerely a Spiritist for that. All my precautions are taken; and should I come to leave this world, you will be notified. “While I wait, my dear sir, have the kindness to ask my brothers of the Spiritist Society to join theirs to our prayers for the unfortunate victims of the epidemic, poor Spirits who are very material, for the most part, and whose detachment must be painful and long. Let us also pray for those, far more unfortunate, who, to the scourge of the malady, add that of inhumanity.

“Our little group has been dispersed for three months; all the members were more or less stricken, but, up to now, none has died.

“Receive, etc.”

— One must be truly a Spiritist to face death with this composure and this indifference, when it spreads its harms around us and when its attacks are felt. It is that, in such a case, a serious faith in the future, such as Spiritism alone can give, provides a moral strength which, itself, is a powerful preservative, as was said with regard to cholera. (Review of November 1865). This does not mean that in epidemics the Spiritists are necessarily spared, but, in such cases they have been, up to now, the least stricken. Needless to say, this concerns Spiritists of the heart, and not those who are so only in appearance.

The destructive scourges, which are to cause harm to Humanity, not upon one point of the globe, but everywhere, are everywhere foreseen by the Spirits.

— The following communication, verbal and spontaneous, was given on the subject, immediately after the reading of the above letter:

(Society of Paris, June 21, 1867. — Medium: Mr. Morin, in spontaneous somnambulism.)

“The hour advances, the hour marked on the great and perpetual clock of the infinite, the hour at which the transformation of your globe is about to begin to take place, to make it gravitate toward perfection. Many times it has been told to you that the most terrible scourges would decimate the populations; is it not necessary that all should die in order to be regenerated? But, what is this? Death is but the transformation of matter; the Spirit does not die, it merely changes its dwelling. Observe and you will see the beginning of the realization of all these predictions. Oh! how happy are those who in these terrible trials have been touched by sincere Spiritist faith! They remain calm in the midst of the storm, like the seasoned mariner amid the tempest. “I, at this moment a spiritual personality, am often accused of brutality, of harshness, and of insensibility by the terrestrial personalities!… It is true, I contemplate with calm all these destructive scourges, all these terrible physical sufferings. Yes, I cross without being moved all these devastated plains, strewn with human remains! But if I can do it, it is because my spiritual vision goes beyond these sufferings and, anticipating the future, it rests upon the general well-being that will be the consequence of these passing evils for the future generation, for you yourselves, who will be part of that generation and who, then, will gather the fruits you shall have sown.

“A collective Spirit, looking down from the height of a sphere where he dwells (he often speaks of himself in the third person), his gaze goes blank; nevertheless, his soul palpitates, his heart bleeds in the face of all the miseries that Humanity must traverse, but the spiritual vision rests on the other side of the horizon, contemplating the result that will be its certain consequence.

“The great emigration is useful and the hour approaches at which it must take place… it already begins… To whom will it be fatal or profitable? Look well, observers; consider the acts of those exploiters of human scourges, and you will distinguish, even with the eyes of the body, the men predestined to decadence. See them avid for honors, inflexible in gain, attached, like their life, to all earthly possessions, and suffering a thousand deaths over the loss of a fraction of what, nevertheless, they will have to leave behind… How terrible for them will be the penalty of retaliation, since, in the exile that awaits them, they will be refused a glass of water to quench their thirst!… Look at them and in them you will recognize, beneath the riches they accumulate at the expense of the unfortunate, the future fallen humans! Consider their labors, and your conscience will tell you whether those labors should be paid up there on high, or here below! Look well at them, men of good will, and you will see that the chaff is beginning, from this Earth onward, to be separated from the good grain. “My soul is strong, my will is great! — My soul is strong because its force is the result of a collective labor from soul to soul; my will is great because it has as its point of support the immense column formed by all the sentiments of justice and of good, of love and of charity. This is why I am strong, this is why I am calm to look on; this is why his heart, which beats almost to bursting in his breast, is not moved. If decomposition is the necessary instrument of transformation, attend, O my soul, calm and impassive, upon that destruction!”

[Review of November 1868.]

EPIDEMIC OF MAURITIUS ISLAND.

In the Review of July 1867 we described the terrible disease that has been devastating Mauritius Island (formerly Isle de France) for two years. The last mail brings us letters from two of our brothers in belief from that country. In one of them is found the following passage:

“I beg you to excuse me for having gone so long without giving you my news. Certainly it was not the desire that was lacking, but rather the possibility; as my time is divided into two parts — one for the work that makes me live, and the other for the disease that is killing us — I have very few moments to employ according to my tastes. Nevertheless, I am somewhat more at ease; for a month I have had no fever. It is true that it is at this season that it seems to yield a little, but, alas! it is to retreat in order to rise higher, for the coming heat will doubtless restore to it its initial vigor. Thus, well convinced of the certainty of that prospect, I live as I can, detaching myself as much as possible from human vanities, in order to facilitate my passage to the world of the Spirits, where, frankly, I should in no way regret finding myself, in good condition, of course.” One day an unbeliever was saying, with regard to a person who expressed an analogous thought concerning death: “One must be a Spiritist to have such ideas!” Without wishing it, he was making the finest eulogy of Spiritism. Is it not a great benefit, the calm with which it makes one consider the fatal end of life, which so many people see approaching with dread? How many anguishes and torments are spared to those who view death as a transformation of their being, an instantaneous transition, without interruption of the spiritual life! They await the departure with serenity, because they know where they are going and what they will be; what increases their tranquility is the certainty not only of meeting again those who are dear to them, but of not being separated from those who remained after them; of seeing them and helping them more easily and better than when alive; they do not regret the joys of this world, because they know that they will have others greater, gentler, without admixture of tribulations. What causes the fear of death is the unknown. Now, for the Spiritists, death no longer has any mysteries.

— The second letter contains what follows:

“It is with a sentiment of profound gratitude that I come to thank you for the solid principles that you instilled in my spirit and which, alone, have given me the strength and the courage to accept with calm and resignation the rude trials that I have been suffering for a year now, owing to the terrible epidemic that is decimating our population. Sixty thousand souls have already departed!

“As you must imagine, the greater part of the members of our group at Port-Louis, which had already begun to function so well, had, like me, to suffer in this general disaster. By a spontaneous communication of July 25, 1866, it was announced to us that we were going to be obliged to suspend our works; three months later we were forced to discontinue them, in consequence of the malady of several of us and the death of our parents and friends. Up to this moment we have not been able to begin again, although all our mediums are alive, as well as the principal members of our group. Several times we tried to gather together again, but we did not succeed. This is why each of us was obliged to take cognizance, individually, of your letter, dated October 26, 1867, to Madame G…, in which is found the communication of Doctor Demeure, who gives us great and very just teachings on all that is happening to us. Each of us was able to appreciate its justness, as concerns himself, for it is to be noted that the disease took on so many multiple forms that the physicians could never reach an agreement. Each followed a particular method. “Nevertheless, the young Doctor Labonté seems to be the one who best defined the disease. I am willing to believe that he is right from the material point of view, for he went through all the sufferings of which he made himself the narrator. n From our spiritualist point of view, we could see therein an explanation of the preface to The Gospel According to Spiritism, because the ill-fated period through which we are passing was marked, at the beginning, by an extraordinary shower of shooting stars, which fell on Mauritius on the night of November 13 to 14, 1866. Although this phenomenon was known, having been very frequent from September to November, at certain periodic times, it is no less admirable that, this time, the shooting stars were so numerous that they impressed and made shudder those who observed them. This imposing spectacle will remain engraved in our memory, because it was precisely after this event that the disease took on a lamentable character. From that moment, it became general and mortal, which today may authorize us to think, as Doctor Demeure says, that we have arrived at the period of the transformation of the inhabitants of the Earth, through their moral advancement. “With regard to the calmatives recommended by Doctor Demeure, you spoke of horse chestnuts, whose use would be more advantageous than quinine, which affects the cerebral organs. Here we do not know this plant; but after the reading of your letter, where mention is made of it, the name of another plant came to my mind by intuition: it is the Croton tiglium, commonly called in Mauritius the purging nut. I employed it as a sudorific, with much success, but only the leaves, for the seed is a violent poison. I beg you to be so kind as to ask Doctor Demeure what he thinks of this plant, and whether he approves of the use I made of it, as a calmative, because I completely share his opinion on the character of this bizarre disease, which seems to me a variant of the “ramannenzaa,” or fever of Madagascar, save for the exterior manifestations.” If one could doubt, for a single instant, the universal popularization of the Spiritist Doctrine, the doubt would disappear on seeing those whom it makes happy, the consolations it provides, the strength and the courage it gives in the most painful moments of life, because it is in the nature of man to seek what can guarantee his happiness and his tranquility. Therein lies the most powerful element of propagation of Spiritism, and one which no one will take from it, unless he gives more than it gives. For us it is a great satisfaction to see the benefits it spreads; each afflicted person consoled, each downcast courage raised up, each moral progress brought about pays us a hundredfold for our pains and our fatigues; here again is a satisfaction that no one has the power to take from us.

— Read at the Society of Paris, these letters provoked the following communications, which treat the question from the double point of view, local and general, material and moral.

(Society of Paris, October 16, 1860.)

In all times the great physiological cataclysms have been made to be preceded by manifest signs of the wrath of the gods. Particular phenomena preceded the eruption of the evil, like a warning to prepare for the danger. Indeed, these manifestations occurred not as a supernatural omen, but as symptoms of the imminence of the disturbance.

As there was reason to tell you, in the crises in appearance the most abnormal which, successively, decimate the different regions of the globe, nothing is left to chance; they are the consequence of the influences of the worlds and of the elements upon one another (October 1868); they are prepared long in advance and their cause is, consequently, perfectly normal.

Health is the result of the equilibrium of the natural forces. If an epidemic disease wreaks havoc in some place, it can only be the consequence of a rupture of that equilibrium; whence the particular state of the atmosphere and the singular phenomena that may be observed there.

The meteors known by the name of shooting stars are composed of material elements, like everything that falls under our senses; they do not appear except thanks to the phosphorescence of these elements in combustion, and whose special nature sometimes develops, in the breathable air, deleterious and morbific influences. The shooting stars were, for Mauritius, not the omen, but the secondary cause of the scourge. Why did their action exert itself in particular upon that region? First because, as your correspondent very rightly said, it is one of the means destined to regenerate Humanity and the Earth properly speaking, by provoking the departure of the incarnate and the modification of the material elements; and, also, because the causes that determine these kinds of epidemic in Madagascar, in Senegal, and everywhere that marsh fever and yellow fever exercise their devastation, not existing on Mauritius Island, the violence and the persistence of the evil were bound to determine the serious investigation of its source, and to draw attention to the part that influences of a psychological order might take therein. Those who survived, in forced contact with the sick and the dying, were witnesses of scenes which at first they did not notice, but whose memory will come back to them with the calm, and which cannot be explained except by Spiritist science. Cases of apparitions, of communications with the dead, of predictions followed by realization, have been very common there. Once the disaster is appeased, the memory of all these facts will arise and will provoke reflections which, little by little, will lead to the acceptance of our beliefs.

Mauritius will be reborn! the new year will see the extinction of the scourge of which it was the victim, not through the effect of the remedies, but because the cause will have produced its effect; other climates, in their turn, will suffer the oppression of an evil of the same nature, or of any other, determining the same disasters and leading to the same results.

A universal epidemic would have sown panic in all Humanity and for a long time held back the march of all progress; a restricted epidemic, attacking successively and under multiple forms each center of civilization, will produce the same salutary and regenerating effects, but will leave intact the means of action of which Science can dispose. Those who die are stricken with impotence; but those who see death at their door seek new means to combat it. Danger makes one inventive; and, when all the material means are exhausted, each will even be constrained to ask salvation of the spiritual means.

No doubt it is terrifying to think of dangers of this nature, but, since they are necessary and will have only salutary consequences, it is preferable, instead of awaiting them trembling, to prepare oneself to confront them without fear, whatever their results may be. For the materialist, it is horrible death and nothingness afterward; for the spiritualist and, in particular, for the Spiritist, what does it matter what happens! If he escapes the danger, the trial will always find him unshakable; if he dies, what he knows of the other life will make him face the passage without turning pale.

Prepare yourselves, then, for everything, and whatever may be the hour and the nature of the danger, become deeply imbued with this truth: death is but a vain word and there is no suffering that human forces cannot master.

Those for whom the evil is unbearable will be the only ones who will have received it with laughter on their lips and indifference in their heart, that is, who will deem themselves strong in their incredulity.

[incredulity in the sense of his little faith.]

Clélie Duplantier. n

(Society of Paris, October 23, 1868.)

The croton tiglium can certainly be employed with success, above all in homeopathic doses, to calm the cramps and reestablish the normal circulation of the nervous fluid; one may also use it locally, rubbing the skin with a light infusion, but it would not be prudent to generalize its use. It is not here a medicine applicable to all the sick, nor to all the phases of the disease. Should it come into public use, it should only be applied on the indication of persons who could ascertain its usefulness and appreciate its effects; otherwise, one who had already experienced its salutary action might, in a given case, be completely insensible to it, or even experience its drawbacks. It is not one of those neutral medicines that do no harm when they do not produce good. It should only be employed in special cases, and under the direction of persons possessing sufficient knowledge to direct its action. Moreover, I hope that it will not be necessary to test its efficacy, and that a calmer period is preparing for the unfortunate inhabitants of Mauritius. It is not true that they are already free, but, save for exceptions, in general the attacks are not mortal, unless incidents of another nature come to give them a character of particular gravity. In itself the disease is reaching its end. The island is entering the period of convalescence; there may be some small recrudescences, but I have reasons to believe that the epidemic will, from now on, go on diminishing until the complete extinction of the symptoms that characterize it.

But what will be its influence upon the inhabitants of Mauritius who shall have survived the disaster? What consequences will they deduce from the manifestations of every nature, of which they were involuntary witnesses? Will the apparitions, of which a great number were the object, produce the effect that one has the right to expect of them? The resolutions taken under the empire of fear, of remorse, and of the reproaches of a disturbed conscience, will they not be reduced to nothing when tranquility returns?

It would be desirable that the memory of these lugubrious scenes should be engraved in an indelible manner upon their spirits, and oblige them to modify their conduct, rectifying their beliefs; because they must be well persuaded that the equilibrium will not reestablish itself in a complete manner except when the Spirits are so stripped of their iniquity that the atmosphere is purified of the deleterious miasmas that provoked the birth and the development of the evil.

We are entering more and more into the transitional period, which must lead to the organic transformation of the Earth and to the regeneration of its inhabitants. The scourges are the instruments of which the great surgeon of the Universe makes use to extirpate, from the world destined to march forward, the gangrened elements that provoke in it disorders incompatible with its new state. Each organ, or rather, each region will be, successively, dissected by scourges of various natures. Here, the epidemic under all its forms; there, war, famine. Each one must, then, prepare himself to bear the trial in the best possible conditions, improving himself and instructing himself, in order not to be taken unawares. Some regions have already been tried, but their inhabitants would be roundly mistaken if they relied on the era of calm, which is to succeed the tempest, in order to fall back into their old errors. It is a small truce that is granted them, to enter upon a better path; if they do not take advantage of it, the instrument of death will try them until it brings them to repentance. Blessed are those whom the trial struck at the outset, because they will have, to instruct themselves, not only the evils they suffered, but the spectacle of those their brothers in humanity, who in their turn will be stricken. We hope that such an example will be salutary to them, and that they will enter, without hesitating, upon the new path, which will allow them to march in accord with progress. It would be desirable that the inhabitants of Mauritius should not be the last to draw profit from the severe lesson they received.

Doctor Demeure.

[1] Doctor Labonté described the epidemic of Saint-Maurice Island in a pamphlet that we read with interest, and in which he reveals himself a serious and judicious observer. He is a man devoted to his art, and as far as one can judge from afar, by analogy, he seems to us to have well characterized that singular disease, from the physiological point of view. Unfortunately, as concerns therapeutics, it frustrates all the predictions of Science. In an exceptional case, such as this one, the failure would prejudge nothing against the physician’s knowledge. Spiritism opens to medical science entirely new horizons, by demonstrating the preponderant role of the spiritual element in the economy [in the organism] and in a great number of afflictions, in which Medicine fails, because it persists in seeking the cause thereof only in tangible matter. The knowledge of the action of the perispirit upon the organism will add a new branch to pathology and will profoundly modify the manner of treatment of certain diseases, whose true cause will no longer be a problem. [1]

[cf. Clélie Duplantier.]